"How not good?"
"Total loss. Highways clogged. We lost a lot of soldiers. A lot of civilians, hell, almost all of the civilians. There were fires there, and the dead walked together by the hundreds like they were all part of the same great beast. It's a total dead zone."
"So, you're saying to stay away."
"I'm saying you should run away. That's what we're doing. Get some mountains between us and them because if the dead somehow find their way out here, they'll wash right over you, and they won't even leave your bodies behind, just soak you up in their tide and drag you and yours away."
Moseley sat back, but Tejada didn't let him break eye contact. "You're serious," Moseley said.
"It'll happen sooner or later."
"Don't you think they'll rot to pieces at some point?" Moseley asked.
"I ain't seen it yet, so I'm not going to count on it."
Tejada changed tacks then. Let them speak of happier things, commonalities. The night was long enough for nightmares. "Did you ever see a General out that way? Been wondering what happened to him after he left for Denver."
"A general?"
"General McCutcheon, whip-thin, the grayest hair, people love him."
Moseley shook his head. "Can't say as it rings a bell, but I skipped out after the President's announcement, so if he did show up, it would have been after I left."
"Well, it was worth a shot," he said, trying to imagine where General McCutcheon might be or if he had made it all. He was sure the general had made it. He was a tough son of a bitch. "You mind if I have more stew?" Tejada asked.
"Sure," Moseley said.
"You said you had a horse. Can we trade you for it? It could be handy for the little ones."
"Had a horse, but no longer." Moseley looked wistfully at the stew, and Tejada understood right away.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Tejada said, knowing now why the soldier hadn't taken a single bite of the meal.
"It's the way of things."
Tejada scooped up a spoonful of stew, blew on it, and then put it in his mouth. It didn't taste quite as good as it had at first, but he finished the entire bowl, out of respect.
****
Whiteside fumed under his breath. Walt… fucking Walt? What did that scrawny pissant have that he didn't have? He looked at the two cards he had been dealt. He suppressed a smile—pocket aces with another one on the table.
Across from him sat Brown who was always up for a game of cards. Despite all of his religiosity, Brown loved to gamble at some cards. Whiteside knew he was a crafty man; his pokerface game was on point. He examined the cards on the table, trying to figure out if there was anything out there that could beat him.
He decided there wasn't, and he slid his chips in to the middle when his turn came.
Brown regarded him with a side-eye, then he promptly folded. The other two men, one of them Moseley's brother and the other his son, looked at the pile of chips in the middle. The older man mucked his cards immediately, and then it was up to the son. He must have thought he had something because he called. Whiteside raised, and then the last card was dealt. He went all in, and the son did the same.
They showed their cards. It was not Whiteside's night. His three aces were beaten handily by the straight of the boy across the table. "Son of a fuckin' bitch."
The boy, who was really not much younger than Whiteside himself, pulled the chips across the table with a shit-eating grin.
"Y'all are cheatin' up in here," Whiteside said, though he knew that he had lost fair and square.
"That's just the luck of the cards," the older man said.
"Luck my ass. You got a system. I can tell."
The older man just laughed it off, and Whiteside began to secretly believe his own accusations.
"Whatchu guys do around here for fun?" he asked, to calm himself down more than anything.
"Ain't no fun no more," the boy said. "We just watch the road, look for deer. Haven't had any luck the last few weeks."
"Hunting's fun," Whiteside countered.
"It's only fun when you get something. Otherwise, it's just freezing your balls off," the old man said.
"Anyone else around here?" Brown asked.
The old man shook his head. "We're not necessarily sticking our neck out, but I think we'd know if there was. You'd see fires. No one's surviving out in this cold without fire. Saw a few at the beginning of winter. We thought about checking them out, but by the time we went to find them, all we found were a few old campsites. Didn't feel like tracking the people."
"Y'all gonna stick around here then?" Whiteside asked, still amazed that some people were still tied to their homes and their land. He himself couldn't wait to leave home when he'd been younger. His shitty, drunk parents were nothing to him, and his brothers had been worse than that. But he supposed things were different now.
"Where else would we go?" the son asked.
"Someplace with more women would be a start," Whiteside said.
The old man laughed. "Yeah, that would be nice."
The son shuffled the cards, and Whiteside watched him carefully, just in case he was actually cheating. The boy finished shuffling and dealt the cards, and that's when they heard it, the faint sound of clinking outside.
The son stopped dealing, and they paused to see if they could hear the
